is fiction, in which the ethical has been overtly suspended, and all that matters is the putative purity of a collective sacrifice.45
* * *
To return, briefly, to Arendt, and from there to the problem of how historians should treat violence: it is to Arendt’s credit that she came to understand the nature of the methodological impasse that her early use of the term “radical evil” provoked: she rejected the term in Eichmann in Jerusalem, explaining in a letter to Gershom Scholem that “I changed my mind and…. It is now my opinion that no evil is ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ‘thought-defying,’ as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because it finds nothing. That is its banality. Only the good has depth and can be radical.”46 It is not the task of historians, fortunately, to identify, in the same ways as may be critical for normative political theory, what has genuine or radical depth. It is, however, the job of historians to avoid or untangle concepts that are “thought-defying,” to subject them to scrutiny, and to avoid methodological paths that lead only to hopeless irrationalism. This is the task for understanding violence, one with which ancient historians have likewise grappled (in many respects unsuccessfully).47 The fact that such a broad range of concepts might fall under the rubric of “violence” has led to hand-wringing and despair, and to the dismissal of the problem, in the words of Bruce Frier, as “all but intractable, especially because it is virtually impossible to define and depends so much on the perspective of the observer.”48
It is unfortunate that Frier dismissed the problem, however, primarily because his central insight is correct. Violence is not so much a thing to be defined as it is a label used in a process of defining the actions of another, and locating those actions (and sometimes also the motives and character) of others within a discourse of claim-making. In other words, using the label “violent” to describe an action or a person is a way of declaring unacceptable something that another thought appropriate, natural, or necessary.49 By applying the label of violence, individuals engage in a process of actively challenging the legitimacy of what might otherwise be understood to be innocuous, necessary, or well deserved, unmasking these things for what they “really” are. It is not that it “depends so much on the perspective of the observer,” but rather that it depends on the perspective of both the victim and the observer—the receiver of the complaint—and ultimately, on whether the observer can be convinced and—just as important—can convince others that the label of violence is correct.
Two examples might be brought to bear here. The first comes from a cache of documents, largely petitions, surviving from Euhemeria, a small town at the edge of Lake Moeris in the Fayyum in the first century A.D. The petitions are largely addressed to the epistates phylakiton, the local commander of the guards (police chief would be a misnomer, as his function was not policing in the contemporary sense). The commander of the guards was sent petitions from villagers complaining of a predictable set of annoyances in village life: theft, trespass, interpersonal violence, and the like. He had to make decisions about which complaints were reasonable and required official attention, and when he decided that a complaint did, he would forward the petition to the archephodos, who, it appears, was in charge of “arresting” or “sending” the people about whom the petitioner complained.50 Among the petitions one stands out:
Ἀθηνοδώρωι ἐπιστάτῃ φυλακιτῶν παρὰ Ἰσίωνος δούλου Χ[α]— ιρήμονος ἐξηγητοῦ. τῇ Σεβαστῇ β τοῦ ἐνεστῶτο(ς) μηνὸς Παῦνι τοῦ β (ἔτους) Γαίου Καίσαρος Σεβαστοῦ Γερμανι[κ]ο(ῦ) παραγενομένου μου εἰς Εὐημέρειαν τῆς Θεμίστου μερίδ(ος) περὶ μετεώρων ἐλ[ογ]οποιήσαμην πρὸς Ὀννῶφριν Σίλβωνος τῶν ἀπὸ τῆς κώμης ὑπὲρ οὗ ἔχω πρὸς αὐτὸν ἐνεχύρου, ὃς δὲ ἐκ τοῦ ἐναντίου ἄλογον ἀηδίαν μοι ἐπιχειρήσας παρεχρήσατό μοι πολλὰ καὶ ἄσχημα καὶ ἐνειλούμενός ̣ μοι ἀπώλεσα πινακίδα καὶ ἀργυ(ρίου) (δραχμὰς) ξ, ἔτι δὲ καὶ ἐτόλμησεν φθόνους51 μοι ἐπαγαγεῖν αἰτίας τοῦ μὴ ὄντος. διὸ ἀξιῶ γράψαι ἀχθῆναι αὐτὸν ἐπὶ σὲ πρὸς τὴν δέουσαν ἐπέξοδον. εὐτύχ(ει).
To Athenodoros, commander of the guards,
From Ision, slave of Chairemon the exegetes. On the 2nd of the present month of Pauni, dies augusta, in the second year of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, I was present in Euhemeria of the division of Themistos due to some unfinished business, and I had an argument with Onnophris son of Silbon, one of those from the town, about a pledge that I have from him. But he, for his part, treated me with irrational violence, abused me in many unpleasant ways, and beat me. I lost my account book and 60 silver drachmas. Still he dared to cast envy at me, though for no good reason (?). Therefore I ask that you write for him to be brought before you for the necessary punishment. Farewell.52
A lot can be learned about the power of the label of violence and related claimmaking discourses from this story of a confrontation between two men (or a man and a slave) in an Egyptian village. On the one hand there is the accountbalancing slave, Ision, charged by his master to collect a series of debts; on the other hand, the assailant, Onnophris, resists him. Behind Ision’s narrative there may lurk many potential stories about motives, both his own and Onnophris’, and there are some tempting details in Ision’s description. It is interesting, for example, that Ision loses his πίναξ—his account book—in the melee, and given that the argument itself is about the settling of accounts, it seems possible that Onnophris could have been venting his anger over a financial situation both upon Ision’s body and upon the documentation of the ins-and-outs of their previous interactions. The accusations of envy, though grammatically bungled, may also speak volumes about how Ision perceived the nature of their relationship. Envy proceeds from a perceived imbalance in the “right” power distribution in a relationship or set of relationships, and points to the suspicions that ensue when these feel out of order.53 In this case, despite his formal status as a slave, Ision was hardly powerless: this is in part because of the large range of abilities that slaves in the Roman Empire were allotted on behalf of their masters, but also, significantly, because he was the agent not just of any master, but of a fairly important one: the exegetes was connected to the office of the strategos, and in charge of citizenship lists and the appointment of guardians.54 Likewise, there are the details of the violent acts themselves: Onnophris’ “irrational violence” (ἄλογον ἀηδίαν), his abuse, and his threats are recorded in the typical, indignant language of complaint—a language that presumes that Ision had dignity capable of injury in the first place. Onnophris, it appears from the petition, did not agree.55
When Ision wrote this petition, he made a public claim about the ways in which he deserved to be treated, sought to get the upper hand in defining the terms of his relationship with another individual, and attempted to involve external authorities in the relationship between himself and another (free) man. As with all claims, his was subject to contest, not just subsequently by his opponent in the courtroom, but also by local authorities (the observers, in Frier’s formulation), who could use their power to decide whether such a claim could be convincing or not.56 In this case
